“For the last 8,000 years we’ve had [relatively] amazing stability with constant weather temperatures and sea level. This stability has allowed the development of agriculture, civilization, industrialization, and a population of 7 billion and rising. This apparent stability is entirely a fluke. It is by amazing good luck that we are here today looking back on the past.”
~ John Nissen (12-4-2014), Arctic Methane Emergency Group

On the 4th, 5th, and 6th of December of the year 2014, the Arctic Methane Emergency Group (AMEG) held press briefings at the COP-20 United Nations Climate Change Conference that is taking place in Lima, Peru. For those unfamiliar with AMEG, here is a summary about them from their website that illustrates their proven track record of predictions:

AMEG is a group of determined scientists, engineers, communicators and others, dedicated firstly to establishing what really is happening to our planet (especially in the Arctic) using best scientific evidence, secondly to finding effective and affordable means to deal with the situation, and thirdly communicating these matters to authority and the general public.

AMEG aims to position itself in the centre ground – neither overstating nor understating the dangers of climate change. We are only alarmist in the sense that we are drawing attention to the more unpleasant realities of rapid Arctic warming and climate change, which have been downplayed or ignored by IPCC, unwittingly backed up by the media. We are determinedly optimistic as regards promoting an intervention strategy against all the odds, believing that mankind must have the collective intelligence to sort out the mess that mankind has got itself into.

In early 2012, AMEG gave evidence to the UK’s Environment Audit Committee in their inquiry on protecting the Arctic. Much of our evidence was dismissed by government advisers, but all our evidence has been borne out by subsequent observations and events, including: the rapid rise in temperature of Arctic ocean and atmosphere; the dramatic decline of sea ice to a record minimum in September 2012 (following the exponential downward trend we had warned the committee about); the exponential increase in release of the potent greenhouse gas, methane, from the Arctic Ocean seabed; the exponential increase in melting of the Greenland Ice Sheet and consequent sea level rise; and the continuing disruption of the jet stream patterns we expected from Arctic warming, with resulting climate change in the form of weather extremes (despite a continuing hiatus in global warming), causing widespread crop failures and increase in the food price index above the crisis level, thus promoting civil conflict in a number of Asian and African countries where food prices have recently escalated, including most notably Syria.

Recent independent research, by scientists in AMEG and elsewhere, puts beyond reasonable doubt our assertion that the Arctic is locked in a vicious cycle of warming and melting, with the sea ice well past its tipping point. The current albedo forcing from snow and sea ice retreat is now estimated at around 0.4 to 0.5 Watts per square meter, averaged globally, amounting to 200 to 250 terawatts heating in the Arctic – more than mankind’s total energy consumption. This albedo forcing is liable to double within a few years as the snow and sea ice further retreat. AMEG believes that the vicious cycle of warming and melting can only be broken by rapid intervention to cool the Arctic.

Although AMEG’s research has concentrated on the Arctic and its effect on climate change, our study of IPCC’s own evidence suggests just how serious are the long-term prospects of climate change due to both CO2 and methane – far more serious than claimed by IPCC itself. The carbon budget for CO2 – the allowable amount of CO2 to avoid dangerous climate change – has already been used up, if one takes into account the effect of methane and other greenhouse gases. If one also takes into account the climate forcing through albedo loss in the Arctic, then it is clear that the world is heading for extremely dangerous global warming by mid-century, even without Arctic methane. The only way to head off such a disaster is by reducing the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere well below their current levels, using a combination of aggressive reduction in both CO2 and methane emissions but also by removal of CO2 from the atmosphere.

The videos of all three press briefings are below. They essentially cover much of the same material, but are all worth watching for the details that the different speakers give illustrating mankind’s dire predicament. Following the videos, I summarize AMEG’s discussions along with their conclusions. We truly are at a turning point in the survival of our species.

Highly reflective snow and ice is being replaced by dark sea water which is much more [absorbent] of solar energy causing the Arctic to warm much, much faster than the rest of the planet. This is destabilizing the atmospheric air circulation and ocean circulation. It is reducing the temperature gradient or difference between the equator and the pole which slows down the jet stream making it wavier with higher ridges and troughs. The jet stream has also become prone to stagnating in the same region. Very warm, humid southerly air can go to much higher latitudes than before, and cold arctic air can go to much southerly latitudes than before. This in itself is representing an enormous positive reinforcing feedback (not positive for humans) which is carrying more and more heat up into the Arctic and more and more coldness from the Arctic further south. What this will do is fracture the jet streams, leading us to a very different world, a less predictable climatic world where weather extremes such as torrential rains and extended droughts and floods come to dominate the weather system. The frequency, severity, and duration of these events all increase. These events also occur in regions where we did not have this before. For example, we get 80cm(32 inches) of snow in the Atacama Desert which is the driest region of the planet – an unprecedented event. We get torrential rains where we had desert before. We get desert where we had moderate temperatures before. This is already happening now with just 0.85 °C of warming that the world has experienced since the start of the industrial revolution. This situation is very dependent on the conditions in the Arctic. As the Arctic continues to exponentially decline in snow and sea ice cover, these extremes will undoubtedly have to increase. The physics of the system says so. Because we now live in a warmer planet, there is more evaporation of the oceans leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere which fuels stronger storms. (The atmosphere can hold 7% moisture for every 1°C increase in average temp. Since we have increased the average temp by ~0.8°C from pre-industrial times, we have 6% more water vapor in the atmosphere). Because we have changed the chemistry of the atmosphere, we have changed the planet’s weather and climate.

• Once we reach a point of no Arctic sea ice, perhaps as early as September 2015, this will create a “blue ocean event” in which all the heat from the sun will be able to penetrate Arctic waters, vastly accelerating the rate at which the Arctic is warming. Consequently, massive disruption of atmospheric circulation and ocean currents will ensue, thus locking the Arctic into an ice-free state. Global sea levels will rapidly rise and climate chaos will ramp up.
• The East Siberian Arctic Shelf, containing hundreds to thousands of times more heat trapping gases than what are presently in the atmosphere, is in the process of releasing a catastrophic amount of greenhouse gases.
• Climate models do not take into account fractures, imperfections in the sea floor, regions of unfrozen subsea methane and other weak points in methane deposits. The models simply treat these areas as uniform slabs that will act in a predictable and symmetrical manner.
• Historical ice core and sediment records show numerous instances of the Earth having undergone abrupt climate change of 5-6°C or greater within a very short time period, one or two decades.
• The initial heat-trapping strength of methane(CH4) is up to several hundred times more powerful than CO2 during the first couple decades of its release into the atmosphere before degrading into CO2.
• Collapse of Civilization is assured at a 4°C rise in global temperature.

Scientists consider a global warming of 6°C to be a threat to the survival of humanity, and anything beyond an increase of 2°C to be intolerable (as recorded at the Asia-Europe Summit by Khor, September 2006). – Link

• Even conservative IPCC projections of BAU predict a 4°C rise in global temperature by the end of the century and this estimate does not include the methane release from the Arctic seabed, permafrost and tundra. No where in its reports does the IPCC state that a 4°C would be catastrophic to civilization and life on Earth.
• Simply attempting to “adapt” to anthropogenic climate change is not a realistic option.
• The meme of money and profit holds sway over all of society.
• The operating system of global civilization, i.e. neoclassical economics, is fatally flawed and it will kill us.
• The consequences of predicted drought from global warming will make food production impossible in most of the world…

AMEG’S CONCLUSIONS ARE:
• A life-affirming system of ecological economics must replace the current ecocidal model of neoclassical economics.
• Institutions must divest from fossil fuel investments and burst the carbon bubble.
• Techniques for cooling the Arctic need to be implemented now, such as spraying salt into the atmosphere to thicken clouds. Additionally, carbon sequestration techniques need to be implemented now, such as biochar burial which is a carbon negative technology that also enriches soil fertility.
• The world must recognize that a 2°C target is not the benchmark we need to worry about right now. We need to worry about and immediately deal with the destabilization and disruption of our climate and weather patterns that are already occurring today at 0.85 °C.
• Only a concerted international effort will provide us with a chance to mitigate and adapt to climate change by building a deep toolbox of approaches to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. However, reducing emissions alone will not be sufficient. An active withdrawal of CO2 from the atmosphere will need to be a part of managing climate change.

The glaciers in the embayment lost mass throughout the entire period. The researchers calculated two separate quantities: the total amount of loss, and the changes in the rate of loss.

The total amount of loss averaged 83 gigatons per year (91.5 billion U.S. tons). By comparison, Mt. Everest weighs about 161 gigatons, meaning the Antarctic glaciers lost a Mt.-Everest’s-worth amount of water weight every two years over the last 21 years.

The rate of loss accelerated an average of 6.1 gigatons (6.7 billion U.S. tons) per year since 1992.

From 2003 to 2009, when all four observational techniques overlapped, the melt rate increased an average of 16.3 gigatons per year — almost three times the rate of increase for the full 21-year period. The total amount of loss was close to the average at 84 gigatons.

Also in the news a few months ago was the realization that Greenland’s ice sheet loss has doubled in just the last five years. Greenland’s ice is much more unstable and prone to collapse than previously thought, and it alone holds enough ice to raise sea levels by nearly twenty-three feet. Paul Beckwith notes that the rate of change in ice melt from Greenland and Antarctica has doubled every seven years for the last couple decades and that if we continue on this trend, then the world will indeed experience a sea level rise of nearly twenty-three feet by 2070.

Last month a seemingly reassuring headline stated that ‘Alaska shows no signs of rising Arctic methane‘ according to NASA’s CARVE project (Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment), but any hopes about the ticking methane time bomb in the Arctic were quickly dashed after reading the article:

…High concentrations of atmospheric methane have been measured at individual Arctic sites, especially in Siberia. This adds to the concern that massive methane releases are already occurring in the far North. NASA’s multiyear Carbon in Arctic Reservoirs Vulnerability Experiment (CARVE) is the first experiment to establish emission rates for a large region of the Arctic…

Alaska composes about one percent of Earth’s total land area, and its estimated annual emissions in 2012 equaled about one percent of total global methane emissions. That means the Alaskan rate was very close to the global average rate.

“That’s good news, because it means there isn’t a large amount of methane coming out of the ground yet,” said lead author Rachel Chang, formerly at Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts, and now an assistant professor and Canada Research Chair in Atmospheric Science at Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Charles Miller of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, the principal investigator for CARVE, noted that results from a single year cannot show how emissions might be changing from year to year. “The 2012 data don’t preclude accelerated change in the future,” he said.

Vast amounts of carbon are stored in undecayed organic matter—dead plants and animals—in Arctic permafrost and peat. Scientists estimate that there is more than twice as much carbon locked in the frozen North as there is in the atmosphere today. The organic material won’t decay and release its carbon as long as it stays frozen. But climate change has brought warmer and longer summers throughout the Arctic, and permafrost soils are thawing more and more. If large amounts of undecayed matter were to defrost, decompose and release methane and carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, the impact on global temperatures would most likely be enormous.

Because no other program has made measurements as comprehensive and widespread as CARVE’s, Chang said, “One of the challenges is that we have nothing to compare our results to. We can’t say whether emissions have already increased or stayed the same. Our measurements will serve as a baseline.”

We already know that methane levels have increased two-and-a-half times since the pre-industrial era and “since 2007 atmospheric methane has been on a renewed sustained increase… due to planetary feedback emissions.” Methane has “more than doubled its 800,000 [year] maximum”:

This increase in atmospheric methane started as a result of carbon feedback feedback methane (CH4) from anomalously high temperatures in the Arctic and greater than average precipitation in the tropics, rather than from increased industrial emissions (Dlugokencky et al, 2009). – Link

We also know that scientists continue to be shocked and awed at the increasingly accelerated rate at which glaciers around the world are melting. Essentially, industrial civilization is whistling past the graveyard.

Because of AMEG’s honest assessment about the climatic state of the world and the horrific future mankind faces, I support their efforts. We have no time left for philosophical musings about the ethics of AMEG’s geo-engineering ideas to cool the Arctic or debating why, how, and who is responsible for the mess we are in. The Blue Ocean Event is coming and time is not on our side.

“The end of the Arctic will be the noose gently placed around our necks. Get your affairs in order, Humankind.” ~ The Final Stand

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About xraymike79

I'm a social critic, political/cultural commentator and artist. The modern industrial world is on the cusp of great changes to our current unsustainable way of life. Most people are oblivious to the paradigm shift that will occur, but some are starting to awaken to the fact that the future will not resemble the halcyon days of the last half century in America as evidenced by the OWS movement. My objective is to highlight important news stories and find the truth that is hidden behind what Joe Bageant called the American Hologram.
www.collapseofindustrialcivilization.com

127 thoughts on “Accelerating Towards an Arctic Blue Ocean Event”

“A new study by researchers at the University of Exeter has found early warning signals of a reorganisation of the Atlantic oceans’ circulation which could have a profound impact on the global climate system.

The research, published today in the journal Nature Communications, used a simulation from a highly complex model to analyse the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC), an important component of the Earth’s climate system.

It showed that early warning signals are present up to 250 years before it collapses, suggesting that scientists could monitor the real world overturning circulation for the same signals…”

The multiple anonymous personality Sam Carana (AMEG) believes he has the solution to climate change! He has a plan. A plan….that’s all it is. I was banned from his group Climate Alert for posting climate alerts and information regarding the not so renewable and finite nature of “alternative” energy and it’s destruction to the planet. Some of us know that industrialized civ/humans can’t deal with life without energy and they don’t seem to get that life itself is finite.

If and when fossil fuel divestment were to come to full fruition, then reality would set in about how dependent we really are on fossil fuels. So I see fossil fuel divestiture in a similar light as anti-civs wanting to bring down what they know is unsustainable anyway.

I think it is an enormous “if”. My own observations are that most people are unwilling to risk their privileged retirements for a threat that seems far off or they think is only going to be an inconvenience to them. My mom collects a fossil fuel invested BC teachers pension, my sister in law is teaching and paying into it and my sister pays into a BC public health care employee pension. None of them understands the severity of the situation. I think, like many otherwise intelligent people, they are intentionally looking the other way or hoping the government will “do something”. This is a by product of generations of privileged living. Surely the grand babies will be alright.

“Even Stanford’s divestment pledge is less impressive than it first appears. Students had originally demanded the university divest stocks of hundreds of fossil fuel companies. But that was later whittled down to coal miners—a much smaller group.”

the entophy is telling us we transform the radiation(PV) or wind etc. into waste = heat. to stabilize earths climate earth always needed trees…many trees and a living sea with live in it. so as tom murphy told us, when we replace all to a electricity and renewablea dn still grow we soon will have a hot surface only through the heat waste (no GHG in this calc) from our industiral civilication activity. this is well know since the 60’s so we would have had to leave industrial civil behind sooner or later.

We can kiss all the coastal cities goodbye, flooded first and then inundated. The droughts will be a problem, not only will crops be destroyed and surface waters greatly diminished, our groundwater is currently being made toxic. The power plant turbines, needed for A/C to counter the deadly heat will no longer run due to lack of water. How much credit will exist in a world that is in a permanent economic contraction? How much credit will be available for solar and wind, building flood walls up and down the coasts, mounting a costly geoengineering project to cool the arctic while upgrading the military for the final showdown with the other mindless metastatic blobs on the planet? Society can’t even fix Fukushima and we’re going to fix the entire Arctic which is already blowing methane like a shaken pop bottle. I just can’t decide if it’s worthwhile buying another twenty years by moving to New Zealand, which will eventually be renamed New Yuanland after the existing population is eliminated for the benefit of the Chinese capitalist upper crust. Throw in regular super-typhoons, enhanced earthquake activity and a mega-tsunami or two and watch the cookie crumble. People locked below deck on this sinking ship will be fed propaganda promising techno-salvation while the upper crust meet far south of the equator running their media simulacrum by remote control. Law enforcement, surveillance and a greatly expanded prison system will take care of the unfaithful, for a while, at least until the lifeboats are well out of range.

Geo-engineering is going to happen whether we like it or not. I suppose I’m infatuated with AMEG’s critique of capitalism. If the Arctic goes, we all go. We can’t survive without it. Time for Hail Mary passes and international Manhattan projects. Should be fun to watch, don’t you think?

I can’t wait to watch some scientist(s) urgently argue for Geo-engineering in front of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. Raytheon Co owns at least one Geo-engineering patent that I know of and they have funded Sen James Inhofe. I can’t wait for the entertainment to begin. Of equal value will be listening to the Jesus industrial denial complex trying to square this circle. ” but the Lord put sulfates here to benefit all humanity”

Stratospheric Welsbach seeding for reduction of global warming
US 5003186 A

I and others I know are struggling with all the above –and to feel we are exercising Woody’s last notion, ‘…merely a healthy concern for the predicament of modern man’ is wry at best. It relates to an interesting consideration (via This Changes Everything, N. Klein) of a possible understanding of denialism: Sociologist Kari Norgaard in Living In Denial..a fascinating exploration of the way almost all of us suppress the full reality of the climate crisis, “Denial can–and I believe should–be understood as testament to our human capacity for empathy, compassion, and an underlying sense of moral imperative to respond, even as we fail to do so.”

I don’t think any of us are able to truly know and feel the unimaginable pain and suffering on the horizon. I can tell you that I read these things, but I can’t really believe it. Deep down inside, I somehow think things will go on as they have and everything will be OK.

Normalcy bias? Ever see that WWII B&W film footage of Jews, on the Eastern front, running into a ditch just to be executed? I ask what were they thinking? Did they think that this can’t be happening and the Nazi’s will change their minds at the last second? How come they did not fight or run the other way?

“There is one fascinating exception to this rule, though. As the researchers note, the only people who consistently offer accurate estimates of bad things happening to them are clinically depressed. So — perfect depression is perfect awareness?”

If that were true why are there so few doomers given the incredible amount of depression in society. The medication does not work for everyone and not very well for many either. Many go off it because of side effects. Also, not every depressed person is diagnosed or on medication/therapy. Women make up the largest percent of depressed people, yet they are the most under represented in the doomer community – but that could just be cause many doomer dudes are assholes;) Present company excluded obviously. Can one be both depressed and in denial? Sounds like I may have come up with a new disorder candidate for the American Psychiatric Association’s next diagnostic manual DSM-6

“Once it was routine for many respected social critics such as Lewis Mumford and Erich Fromm to express concern about the impact of modern civilization on our mental health. But today the idea that the mental illness epidemic is also being caused by a peculiar rebellion against a dehumanizing society has been, for the most part, removed from the mainstream map. When a societal problem grows to become all-encompassing, we often no longer even notice it.”

1 in 5 women are on anti-depressants in the U. S. Fluctuating hormones during reproductive years can cause stress and lead to depression. Women are also more conservative and religious than men. Does some sort of maternal survival instinct prevent them from seeing the truth and being doomers? All my sisters and most women in I know are Religious nuts, how depressing! Anti-depressants don’t work for me, so I just face the truth, after awhile you get used to being a doomer.

However, even if a deal can be reached – despite the urgent need for it – there is no guarantee that global greenhouse gas emissions will actually come down significantly and dangerous climate change can be averted. Psychoanalytic theory provides disturbing insights into why this may be so – and it is all to do with the split psychological make-up of those who work at the forefront of climate science, policy and activism.

Climate denial can be unconscious

For at least a century, psychoanalysis has taught us that we might be consciously thinking and saying one thing, but unconsciously doing another. In this context that means people are very consciously aware of the threats posed by climate change, even if they aren’t doing too much about it.

Not a week goes by without the media showing catastrophic images of environmental damage and social suffering seemingly caused by a changing climate. Research suggests that such threats lead us to adopt various unconscious coping and defence mechanisms.

Many people try to keep the catastrophe at bay or deny it is happening. Vested interests such as the Koch brothers in the US and other conservative forces have cleverly exploited this unconscious response by supporting a small group of scientists, politicians and think tanks to spread the message of climate scepticism and denial.

This stuff works. Climate denial is undoubtedly on the rise, particularly in those media-saturated markets of North America, Europe and Australia. The Kochs and others are clearly filling a psychological void. Research has also shown that “people want to protect themselves a little bit”, particularly in times of crisis and uncertainty. If climate change simply isn’t happening, there’s nothing to worry about.

Another popular coping and defence mechanism is to pretend that we can address this global and urgent problem by tinkering at the edges of “business as usual”. For example, politicians and business leaders widely believe that we can achieve a decarbonisation of the global economy while maintaining high economic growth. Social psychologist Matthew Adams says such a response is part of an unconscious coping mechanism that simply implies that we have pushed the problem onto a distant future.

As the geographer Erik Swyngedouw shows, climate change politics could in fact be seen as a “post-political” phenomenon where apocalyptic images of environmental destruction and human suffering are used to justify swift action without allowing any real political and economic choices. For example, while on one day the UK government is acknowledging that climate change is already having stark impacts on developing countries by pledging £720m to poor countries, another day of the political calendar is dominated by rhetoric that emphasises economic growth and even the expansion of the oil and gas industry in the UK.

Urgent action on climate change is thus to be implemented within a business-as-usual framework of high growth and high consumption, despite growing evidence that such growth doesn’t make us happier and that it is very likely to deliver increasing carbon emissions for years and decades to come.

In psychosocial theory these defence mechanisms are also referred to as “splitting”. Consciously we might be talking about the impending sustainability crisis, but unconsciously we find ways to actually maintain the status quo. This is also true for those climate experts who fly around the world, going from one global climate change summit to the next. The very carbon emissions associated with their work can be seen as part of a denial strategy.

In fact, one could argue that those who are very close to the reality of climate change are particularly prone to a need to split their identity. The knowledge they have, and the images they have seen, might unconsciously lead them to the above-mentioned counter-balancing and coping behaviours. Not a good omen for the latest round of climate talks in Peru.

“…LIMA Chinese negotiators at the Climate Change conference in Peru have rejected a U.S.-led attempt to scrutinize the country’s plans to limit carbon dioxide emissions.

The Chinese move comes a month after US President Barack Obama announced that the U.S. had reached an historic deal with China on climate change, according to which the U.S. would decrease carbon emissions more rapidly and China would stop growing its emissions 15 years from now.

The Chinese negotiators sought to delete provisions in a draft text that would have paved the way for other countries and non-governmental organisations to submit questions about its carbon-reduction plans, according to environmental groups that are official observers to the talks, said the South China Morning Post.

More than 190 countries are gathered at the Lima conference on global warming to come up with a new deal to fight climate change.

US lead climate envoy Todd Stern told reporters that all national pledges should be subject to scrutiny by other countries, saying “the sunshine is intended to prod countries to be as ambitious as possible” in limiting carbon emissions.

“The spirit of constructive cooperation of the US-China agreement seems to have come to a full stop,” Liz Gallagher, senior adviser to the policy analyst group E3G, said in an interview in Lima, where two weeks of UN climate talks began last Monday.

Great article. You need to include the Friday COP20 press conference at noon as well. Why did you leave it out? Also, I presented to the Canadian Parliament on behalf of AMEG the same information in June, 2012 at an “All party climate change caucus meeting”. Please include this also to make the article more complete.

The maximum power principle (MPP) is hard to contain. Religions are semi-successful in restraining greed and selfishness by promising reward after death, even as they use tithes to maintain and expand their own power through the MPP. The poor would like to have some share of the wealth made possible by fossil fuels, but taking from the rich to spur consumption amongst the poor is no solution, but rather counterproductive as it would likely increase overall metabolic activity. We are beyond extending “development” in any direction as the already developed world begins to wind down. However, the clowns on Wall St. will still seek growth and access to any resources they can get their hands on, including what little can be expropriated from the third world. As paychecks disappear in the developed world there will be an incessant pressure to restore them whether the planet cooks or not. In this clip, Paul Beckwith was placed on the “faith” panel. What faith does a scientific priest develop? Geo-engineering? Will a magnificent and expensive aerosol spewing infrastructure be built to serve the faithful? Will they obtain hope and get their true and just rewards on earth, or is this just the final technological hurrah for the cancer that knew no limits.

Also, conspicuous consumption by the very wealthy is far and away more damaging to the planet than the subsistence living of the poor. For most poor people, once they have the essentials of life, it’s enough to keep them happy.

I’m not sure, my great aunt was worth many millions and used to ring-out her paper towels and hang them on a line in the kitchen. Frugal to the end. Some people get serotonin by not consuming, but always have the option. On the other hand, many wealthy will afford the maximum amount of dopamine possible and will flame-out young on drugs and alcohol or go bankrupt trying to impress. Since most of humanity is only reachable by an emotional appeal, then yes, religion is a natural pathway, but when push comes to shove in the use of fossil fuels, many may quickly lose their religion.

GREAT POST, EXCELLENT COMMENTS!!!!
Economics is just a four letter word for hoping nothing changes much more than 3% per year. I think James Hansen’s Fee & Dividend should directly deposited in a new world e-currency to circumvent national regulatory differences. This is the only way to unite the world against their governmental-corporate masters. Not gonna happen. What will happen? Don’t read any further, or, you’ll be sorry you asked.

What if you saw and heard stuff that rocks your little world? Would you change? No, you would not. Would you like to forget it? Yes, you would. But, some things are so horrible that you just can’t unsee them.

Of all the terrible things you are about to see, these next 2 points are the very worst.
►When I was young, I was told my cereal box was more nutritious than my cereal.
►Now, they put the cardboard right into the cereal and say it’s better than the box.

►We shoot bacteria DNA directly into plant DNA and eat it.

► We put man-made, computer designed, synthetic DNA into our food.

► We put nano metals and nano particles into our food.

► We put pesticides and herbicides directly into food cells.

► There are thousands of different chemicals in our foods.

► We are eating stuff that never, ever existed on earth before.

► We are turning into genetic mutants because of our food.

► We are wiping out all life on earth because of our food.

Life is simple: James Hansen wants you to get 100% of your carbon taxes back, Bill McKibben and Naomi Klein do not. Don’t believe me? Then ask them, if you are able, that’s why the Rockefellers fund 350.org. When governments and corporations get control of carbon taxes, we’re finished.

In, “Years Of Living Dangerously” we learned the Indonesian mafia killed all the elephants in a nature preservation park just to get rid of the need for a park. These guys clear cut forests, replace the forests with palm-oil trees, and sell the palm-oil to put into gasoline in Europe. They make money selling lumber, collecting tax carbon credits and selling the palm-oil to burn in cars. Win-win-win.

In, “Virunga” on Netflix, we learned the Congolese mineral mafia is killing off the last Mountain Gorillas so that the need for a national park will cease to exist. Cell phones don’t run on love, you can ask the 2 million children murdered there since 1998, or the 1 million Iraqi children our oil embargo killed in the 1990s. People may think me misanthropic, but that’s not true, some of my best friends are people.

Money used to be metal coins, now money is storage of electric, metallic-mineral pulses. If you are confused by money, metal and climate, then try to think in terms of the mass of all the metals, minerals and elements — energy demand doubles by 2060 — emissions need to drop 80% by 2030 — peak minerals and peak energy hits at the same time we want to produce billions of tons of toxic lead, liquid metal or molten salt batteries — we can’t have hi-tech green energy without heavy rare earth elements and we can’t have heavy rare earth elements without digging up thorium as a radioactive waste — the only solution is to get emissions free power from plentiful thorium so we can create a better hi-tech green energy world — this is important because we are approaching post-peak minerals where we would be unable to afford large enough scales in mining, which even alone can entail collapse. The peak is a short time of several plus years. Economics is just a fancy word for hoping things don’t change much more than 3% per year.

WEIGHTY STUFF

► Humans and livestock were 0.01% of land vertebrate biomass 10,000 yrs. ago.

► Humans and our livestock are now 97% of land vertebrate biomass.

►Humans and our livestock eat over 40% of land chlorophyll biomas

► When we eat over half of nature’s green stuff, bad things happen to bio-diversity.

► 1,000,000 humans, net, are added to earth every 4½ days.

► 50% of vertebrate species died off in the last 50 years.

► 50% of remaining vertebrate species will die off in the next 40 years.

►World Bank says we have 5-10 years before we all fight for food and water.

► 90% of Big Ocean Fish gone since 1950.

► 90% of Lions gone since 1993.

► 90% of Monarch Butterflies gone since 1995.

► 75% of Freshwater & Riverbank Species gone since 1970. **

► 50% of Great Barrier Reef gone since 1985.

► 50% of Human Sperm Counts gone since 1950.

► 50% of Fresh Water Fish gone since 1987.

► 40% of Giraffes gone since 2000.

► 30% of Marine Birds gone since 1995.

► 28% of Land Animals gone since 1970.

► 28% of All Marine Animals gone since 1970.

► 93 Elephants killed every single day.

► 2-3 Rhinos killed every single day.

► Bees die from malnutrition lacking bio-diverse pollen sources.

** ► 75,000 dams block U.S. rivers.

► In just 13 years, we will “lock in” an inevitable near term 6°C earth temp rise because we continually exceed the worse-case emissions scenario set out back in 2007 says climate scientist, Dr. Michael Jennings.

► Tim Garrett explains why money can’t decouple from carbon emissions growth, and how economic growth makes the world hot, as well as how efficiency and conservation only results in more growth.

ABOUT ME: My name is Robert Callaghan.

I am a highly uncredentialed 56-year-old male who cuts grass for a living in a trailer park in Canada, the reason i know all this is because i woke up hungover with my dog licking my face using mental telepathy to explain that space aliens want to use him to tell to me to tell you that we only got one shot left and it has to be a bullseye.

Here are some of the typical “liberal” reactions to what my dog is saying.

Quit Barking Up The Wrong Tree?… No-o-o, Seriously!

These reactions do not differ from FOX NEWS tactics.

► J’Accuse! Oil Troll! Nuclear Troll! etc.

►”Your information is inaccurate and outdated”, this may be, but most exciting “new” discoveries never make it to production, and old methods of production do not stop because they are merely somewhat outdated and post-peak minerals affects everything.

► Misdirect focus on just one or two points to the exclusion of the b-i-g picture.

► Focus attention on my character and motives instead of the facts. That doesn’t work because I am a low-life mangy cur who just doesn’t give a damn. LMAO!

► Attack the facts.

I hate anyone who is better than me, so you can imagine how much I hate this guy.

What if you saw and heard stuff that rocks your little world? Would you change? No, you would not. Would you like to forget it? Yes, you would. But, some things are so horrible that you just can’t unsee them, like going to a strip club on a Monday at noon.

Of all the terrible things you are about to see, these next 2 points are the very worst.
► When I was young, I was told my cereal box was more nutritious than my cereal.

► Now, they put the cardboard right into the cereal and say it’s better than the box.

“Scientists estimate that everyone alive today carries within her or his body at least 700 contaminants, most of which have not been well studied (Onstot and others). This is true whether we live in a rural or isolated area, in the middle of a large city, or near an industrialized area. Because many chemicals have the ability to attach to dust particles and/or catch air and water currents and travel far from where they are produced or used, the globe is bathed in a chemical soup. Our bodies have no alternative but to absorb these chemicals and sometimes store them for long periods of time. Whether we live in Samoa or San Diego, Juneau, or Johannesburg, all our bodies are receptacles for a multitude of industrial chemicals. Wherever we live, we all live in a chemically contaminated neighborhood.

Some of the chemicals residing in our bodies are pesticides, and some are used in or produced by other forms of industrial production. Many are found in a wide variety of consumer products. Some chemicals like dioxins and furans are created unintentionally by industrial processes using chlorine and from the manufacture and incineration of certain plastics. Scientists estimate that there are many other unintentionally created by-products which have not yet been “discovered” since no tests have yet been developed that would fully identify or describe these by-products.”

I live on an old farm that dates back to the late 1700s. I wonder what kind of toxins have accumulated in the soil and ground water. Plus I am surrounded by thousands of acres of commercial and private timber lands where helicopters are used to spray herbicides and fertilizers. Then I smoked pot for years despite being a health fanatic. No wonder I am depressed, my body is filled with toxins. What ps me off, is that the health industrial complex is making it harder to get any kind of decent drugs for relief from this coming inevitable collapse. I just want to die happy.

The nature of the life process is to grow in awareness, intelligence, and power, ever expanding in numbers and domain. This tendency of living entities contains the seeds of their collapse and demise. The seductive appeal of the greater powers that our rapidly increasing intelligence make possible leads to a greed for more and more that becomes unmindful of the wellbeing of others, the environment, and in our addictive frenzy, even of our own self preservation.

The years I have spent among my fellow intoxicant addicts have made me deeply aware of the heedless hubris and madness that possesses many who are seeking more and more. Sadly, few among us are willing to go through the processes of withdrawal and reorientation needed to gain our freedom from these obsessions. It has not left me with much hope that humankind as a whole is in any way ready to make the sacrifices necessary for its liberation from the multiple addictions that have us in their grip.

That which guarantees our fate is within us. Sorry Pogo, we have not met the enemy, and our unconsciousness and denial insure our destruction. The Greek philosopher playwrights had it correctly – the blindness of hubris is our essential tragedy.

But the article doesn’t mention that the initial heat-trapping strength of methane is up to several hundred times more powerful than CO2 in the first couple decades of its release into the atmosphere before degrading into CO2.

here a french and german documentation about methan…much denial but some good infos how the bacterias are decomposting the methane…but will they manage it all the time? and only the sea can manage it…last oil spill in mexico also methan erupted and decomposted via bacteria but only in deep sea when the methan has a long way to go…it will not work on flat sea and on land too less time for the bacteria to dismantle the methane http://www.arte.tv/guide/de/043870-000/energiequelle-methan

Even if you discount the methane, we’re in deep shit once the Arctic sea becomes ice free during the summer, most likely in the month of September by 2020. This will allow a window into which solar energy can warm the waters and greatly amplify runaway Arctic warming, further changing the jet stream and ocean currents. We don’t need the methane wild card for this to be a civilization-ending process.

Well, while the Arctic, Antarctic and Greenland melt and raise the water level let’s look to India and see what’s occurring in an overpopulated location with really bad sanitation. There are no boundaries to keep this in check as it ripples outward. And as American cities devolve into Detroit lookalikes it will come to America after all they hate us for our health-care.

Not sure how sucking up the carbon or seeing fusion actually come about will do anything but deliver more business as usual.

We’re playing those mind games together
Pushing the barriers planting seeds
Playing the mind guerrilla
Chanting the Mantra peace on earth
We all been playing those mind games forever
Some kinda druid dudes lifting the veil
Doing the mind guerrilla
Some call it magic the search for the grail…

People say I’m crazy doing what I’m doing,
Well they give me all kinds of warnings to save me from ruin,
When I say that I’m o.k. they look at me kind of strange,
Surely your not happy now you no longer play the game,
….
I’m just sitting here watching the wheels go round and round,
I really love to watch them roll,
No longer riding on the merry-go-round,
I just had to let it go.

Thanks for linking to that geo-engineering site and article, xraymike. I went right over there and added my two cents. It IS simple: you can’t fix the climate predicament by doing more of the same crap that got us there – what we’re already doing – especially when what’s required is stopping completely. Treating any one symptom of the climate conundrum without addressing them all is pointless and will be fruitless. Even stopping ALL CO2 emissions right now won’t stop what’s already in the pipeline. Industrial civilization is rapidly approaching a dead end, our vaunted “intelligence” turning out to be a lethal mutation rather than any kind of “advantage.”

Adam and Eve didn’t get it, either. They weren’t supposed to have kids, the paradise of Earth was theirs and yet they wanted something more . . .
i guess we’re not supposed to want. Typical humans – designed with flaws.

Makes me think about a link you posted to a piece about Ebola, the UN and Bill Gates calling the shots. That was according to the UN or WHO people if I remember correctly. Gates funds Geo engineering research and owns Geo engineering patents and now one of Gates biggest benefactors is…………? It is probably just a coincidence. I am, after all, just a malcontent pattern seeking mammal. The gang over at Chem-Trail Central should have a field day with this one.

They are all beholden to the power of money. Those who know what’s happening are buying land in the North for their children’s future, however hellish that future may be. No one in powerful positions is doing anything to save the masses. No one is really in control of this out-of-control system. This is the greatest tragedy ever to befall humanity. And the infotainment machine keeps everyone in a daze while the Earth’s life support system unravels. So sad I want to cry.

The most important point of all was made by Paul Beckwith who stated that the 2C target is meaningless because we have already triggered runaway warming in the Arctic whose ice sheets and glaciers are a major climate-regulating feature of the planet. AMEG is correct in their conclusion that if we are unable to reverse this trend, we will have locked ourselves into a world that will fast become uninhabitable for humans.

I am not optimistic that what used to be considered the “Arctic” will persist into the future. The Arctic where I do research now bears little resemblance to the Arctic I first went to in 1970. With models showing summer sea ice may soon disappear and predictions for increasing temperatures and development, it is likely that current and future generations of researchers will also be taken aback with the pace of change during their time in the region. Clearly, the Arctic as a geographic region will persist but the characteristics that are evoked by the word “arctic” (i.e. snow and ice dominated landscapes far from human industrial development) will no longer apply to the region. And, of course, the biota adapted to the arctic ecosystems of the past will have very uncertain futures given the pace of change.

What will it look like in 20, 30, 50 years?

Much of the Arctic became technically subarctic during the last 20 years. At least for the near future, winters will always be cold in the Arctic so some seasonal snow and ice cover will be present but the annual period when snow and ice are present will decrease. The rate at which these changes will take place is unclear as an Arctic that is ice free in summer (and losing land ice in Greenland) might cause more rapid changes.

Can anything happen to save it?

I was very lucky to be able to be in the Arctic in the late 20th Century but it now seems clear that with the projected increases in atmospheric CO2 and resulting increases in temperatures and ocean acidifcation that the Arctic (as well as many of the earth’s natural areas) could be unrecognizable by the middle of the 21st Century.

The profit gained in life, if any, has usually been invested in the reproductive effort. However, the accumulation of profit is limited in nature and must be expended at the moment in the bearing and nurturing of offspring. Now, by utilizing fossil fuels profits have become so enormous so as to facilitate the development of an entirely new and damaging infrastructure serving the desires of a burgeoning human population. Humans previously evolved information and tool-use to attack non-fossil fuel resource gradients like large population of quadrupeds, timber and soils. Unfortunately, the same evolved capabilities have led to the exploitation of the greatest resource gradients of all, fossil fuels, that provided enough energy to bring a macro-scale evolving system into existence. Unfortunately this growth we call civilization resembles a cancer, seeking endless growth and lifespan within an ecosystem whose complexity and variety of species, limits any one species ability to overwhelm all others, thereby destroying the complexity from which it initially arose and still depends upon. The cancer growth and its associated toxic effects destroys the ecosystem’s ability to maintain homeostasis.

A new homeostasis will eventually be reached, but not without destroying most of the complexity within the ecosystem, including humans and their malignant civilization. Most coastal cities are already to be lost, ocean’s are acidified, biodiversity is being crushed, methane is leaking, and all “humanity” can do is push the knife deeper into life’s heart and twist.

The apocalypse has been staring us right in the face all along as we drew illusionary lines in the sand for acceptable upper limits to global warming. The simple fact is that we have irreparably shattered the delicate chemical equilibrium of the Earth’s carbon cycle, pushing atmospheric CO2 to levels that are ten times the Earth’s natural homeostatic ability to process it:

“Present-day anthropogenic CO2 emissions due to fossil fuels, at approx. ten gigatons of carbon a year, are greater than the release rates of this natural process by a factor of at least ten.” ~ Link

“Antarctic icesheet started to form once atmospheric CO2 levels fell below about 500 ppm, and the Greenland and West Antarctic icesheets formed when levels fell below about 400 ppm.” ~ Clive Hamilton

“The apocalypse has been staring us right in the face all along as we drew illusionary lines in the sand for acceptable upper limits to global warming.”

Right on.

And those efforts (of various degrees, by many sane folks) to do something contrary, to change direction, along the way of the march toward destruction were often crushed by Oil-Qaeda or their lackeys (One Example).

Extrapolating from Stager’s book, the good news is that “runaway” greenhouse effect does not mean a point of no return. Earth itself has been able to reverse even the most severe greenhouse conditions of the past, so far. (I’ll save the bad news till the end of the post).

“Runaway” is reached when rising temperatures create “positive feedback loops” in the biosphere that cannot be stopped by any means internal to the biosphere until the reactions that are fueling the feedback are exhausted. (Only external forces such as long-term changes in planetary orbibal dynamics or the hypothetical external hand of artificial technology can override the feedback prematurely). Earth has a far more complex biosphere than Venus and more favorable long-term orbital dynamics. Apparently this gives the planet an emergent homeostatic capacity to rectify extremes in its biosphere. The most dramatic greenhouse event known (called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM) occurred 55 million years ago. Core samples and microcellular fossil evidence at the North Pole suggests that the near-surface temperature of the Polar ocean rose to about 70 degrees Fahrenheit over a course of just a few thousand years. The oceans of the world suddenly turned so corrosive (from excessive carbon entering the water, creating carbolic acid) that they “burned” a vivid band of red into the oceans’ clay sediments of the time. Nevertheless, since the PETM, the planet has been in a slow, long-term cooling trend.

Now the bad news: The planet took about 200,000 years to correct the PETM, and the majority of living species didn’t make it through. The computer models that Stager references for his book indicate that the damage ALREADY DONE to the atmosphere in our time will take upwards of 50,000 years for the planet’s natural homeostatic ability to fully correct.

Stager’s conclusion in a nutshell is that the point of no return will be reached about 2050. All fossil fuel consumption must cease by then to avoid a runaway greenhouse effect. Since the oil & coal industries will make certain humankind doesn’t abandon its fireplaces and internal combustion engines in 35 years, the only hope humanity has in avoiding the global greenhouse lies in the prospect of future technology that can directly eliminate carbon from the atmosphere (Stager makes clear why transferring the carbon into the oceans will not suffice).

“It is well known that atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) (and other greenhouse gases) have increased markedly as a result of human activity since the industrial revolution. It is perhaps less appreciated that natural and managed soils are an important source and sink for atmospheric CO2 and that, primarily as a result of the activities of soil microorganisms, there is a soil-derived respiratory flux of CO2 to the atmosphere that overshadows by tenfold the annual CO2 flux from fossil fuel emissions.”http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24425529

“According to an ongoing temperature analysis conducted by scientists at NASA the average global temperature on Earth has increased by about 1.4°Fahrenheit since 1880. Two-thirds of the warming has occurred since 1975.”

Climate change is happening very quickly compared to changes that occurred in the past: “As the Earth moved out of ice ages over the past million years, the global temperature rose a total of 39.2 to 44.6°Fahrenheit over about 5,000 years. In the past century alone, the temperature climb of 1.4°Fahrenheit is roughly ten times faster than the average rate of ice-age-recovery warming.”

Much has been made of the fact that the rate of surface warming has slowed in the past decade. Yet the physical properties of CO2 and other greenhouse gases cannot change. But if that’s true, where is this heat going? The answer is into the deep oceans.

Before the industrial revolution, the CO2 content in the air remained quite steady for thousands of years. Natural CO2 is not static, however. It is generated by natural processes, and absorbed by others. Natural land and ocean carbon remains roughly in balance and have done so for a long time – and we know this because we can measure historic levels of CO2 in the atmosphere directly in ice cores.

Although our output of 29 gigatons of CO2 is tiny compared to the 750 gigatons moving through the carbon cycle each year, it adds up when more CO2 is released from outside of the natural carbon cycle by burning fossil fuels because the land and ocean cannot absorb the extra CO2. About 40% of this additional CO2 is absorbed. The rest remains in the atmosphere, and as a consequence, atmospheric CO2 is at its highest level in 15 to 20 million years (Tripati 2009). A natural change of 100ppm normally takes 5,000 to 20,000 years. The recent increase of 100ppm has taken just 120 years). *[Do not to confuse this counting of 29 gigatons of CO2 with the counting that only includes the mass of the carbon atoms in CO2. In that computation, 29 gigatons is replaced by roughly 10 gigatons]

Human CO2 emissions upset the natural balance of the carbon cycle. Man-made CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by a third since the pre-industrial era, creating an artificial forcing of global temperatures which is warming the planet. While fossil-fuel derived CO2 is a very small component of the global carbon cycle, the extra CO2 is cumulative because the natural carbon exchange cannot absorb all the additional CO2.

The level of atmospheric CO2 is building up, the additional CO2 is being produced by burning fossil fuels, and that build up is accelerating.

The primary sickness of humankind is abuse of power. Unless this is deeply understood all attempts to correct our fatal course are doomed to failure. Real love is a complex of inner states of mind that result in behaviors which lead to using power only to enhance the wellbeing of all members of humanity. Learning to transition away from the abusive use of power to it’s constructive use is the challenge now facing us. Paths of practice leading to this transformation of power relationships have been developed since ancient times, and need to be further developed and widely promoted. Failure to pursue this possibility will result in our demise as a species. Perverted and pretended paths to transformation are of course worse than useless – they are part of the problem. Implementing authentic paths is our only remaining hope. Time is short, we must begin now to create the means for our continuation.

“The task of right mindfulness is to clear up the cognitive field. Mindfulness brings to light experience in its pure immediacy. It reveals the object before it has been plastered over with conceptual paint, overlaid with interpretations. To practice mindfulness is thus not so much a matter of doing as undoing: not thinking, not judging, not associating, not planning, not imagining, not wishing.” Bhikkhu Bodhi

Isn’t that a description of the witnessing state? Is this not what we are practicing when we meditate, letting go in order to rest in that pure consciousness prior to all our mental activities – a state of simple being without focus or content other than itself? So, meditation is practicing witnessing. In the beginning and for a long time there are constant interruptions from the habitual operations of the mind and senses, but gradually little moments of emptiness are there, which may be eventually prolonged (without effort!) and this will begin to subtly color our daily experience outside of formal meditative sessions. The pure unpolluted mind has always been there, underneath all the stuff we are obsessively focusing on. It waits patiently for us to spend some time with it – or not. We can return to our home consciousness anytime we become willing to do the practice to clear away the fog of our usual mental activity…

Isn’t the usual practice of focusing attention on what we are doing just a stage towards letting go of even that focus (and the subtle effort involved) in order to experience “just standing” without any focus or effort?

To cease to be identified with the productions of one’s own mind yields the freedom to be self critical and self directed. This is liberation from one’s own unconscious enslavement to the automatic operations of the conditioned and historical mind and its limited perspectives.

As we sometimes say on the path of AA, “Let go, and let the higher, deeper Mind take over.” We all have that Mind, and find that we have always been unified with each other, and with all things in that Sacred Space.

Some really good writing (with plenty of source material) on the myth of “free market” capitalism in a world where corporate monopoly of entire industries is the rule, entirely by design, made possible by massive government subsidy and a priesthood of economists busily installing the carefully crafted propaganda in the heads of countless college kids everywhere.

And, of course, brutally enforced by jackboots in police uniforms who can be counted on to immediately and violently crush any hint of opposition or insurrection.

This wholesale disappearance of the past serves a purpose for the elites. It allows nonsense economics doctrines to flourish. Most particularly, it allows the quasi-religion of libertarianism to flourish, which is accepted by nearly everyone in the United States to some degree or another. People in America accept that the wealth they enjoy is entirely due to the “private sector” and government is nothing more than a burden that has prevented capitalism from delivering it’s promises and must be restrained, curtailed, or perhaps eliminated entirely and replaced by the ministrations of the “free” market.

[…]

So ideas of government in opposition to markets and companies in competition with one another are nothing but pure hogwash and propaganda designed to sucker the rubes in Middle America who believe in free market bullshit to accept falling living standards, the gutting of the middle class, and the destruction of democratic governance. History shows that these libertarian ideas are absolute fantasies.

“First, unfortunately (IMHO) your YouTube persona is kind of idiosyncratic. The XrayMike name is iffy to me, and the avatar photo is downright spooky. I believe this material needs to be presented as ‘straight’ and with as much decorum and credibility as possible. ”

Thanks for the essay ,links,and other info,Mike.Thanks to all for your comments and links.I haven’t had an internet connection here for ten days,so I am catching up with things.I hardly know what to say anymore. Every angle on the whole situation points to an unrecognisable planet in the not-so- distant future.

Most of us will be dead (not from old age) long before climate change becomes a serious factor. I don’t deny it is serious but it’s like being in a boat and worrying about the paint work when the boat has gigantic hole in it and water is pouring in. Plummeting oil prices are very concerning and signal the beginning of the collapse. See “Perfect storm energy finance and the end of growth” by tullett prebon. Yes, apparently London based money market traders are well aware of what is going on. That fact alone is downright scary.

The perfect storm of energy finance and the end of growth is not enough by itself to self extinct. If we reacted with a full scale nuclear war that could do it. On the other hand once we get to 6 degrees Celsius above baseline, our ship is sunk. That will happen later this century.

Psychological concepts of how we view the world around us, including
‘creeping normalcy’ or ‘landscape amnesia’, block day-to-day comprehension of
what accelerating human activities represent—whether it is human population,
the number of dammed rivers, forest destruction, or the impact of motor car
emissions in a timespan that is geologically brief. Creeping normalcy refers to
slow trends concealed in noisy fluctuations that people get used to without
comment, while landscape amnesia describes forgetting how different the
landscape looked 20–50 years ago (Diamond 2005: 425).

In his study of how societies fail, biogeographer Jared Diamond calls global
warming a pre-eminent example of a ‘slow trend concealed by wide up and
down fluctuations’ (2005: 425). He likens the denial of climate change impacts
by leading politicians, including former US president George W. Bush (and his
contemporary John Howard in Australia), in the late 1990s and early 2000s to
the elite of ‘the medieval Greenlanders [who] had similar difficulties recognizing
that their climate was gradually becoming colder, and the Maya and Anasazi
(in Central and North America) [who] had trouble discerning that theirs was
becoming drier’ (2005: 425).

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OWS knows who really pulls the strings

"...the megawealthy and Washington have become so symbiotic as to be a single entity. Indeed, Occupy's best move, as conservative blogger/financier Gregory Djerejian noted at TheAtlantic.com, was "directing their ire squarely toward the real elites of the country, rather than their bought-and-paid marionettes sitting in Washington."

Preserving the Status Quo

There is no right wing or left wing, only the aristocracy and the serfs (a vertical paradigm).
To know this is to be like a fish who has broken the surface of the water, realizing he was in water the whole time.

A Kabuki Play

"What we have, in what passes for US democracy in 2012, is a kabuki play that Cicero put to papyrus 1948 years earlier. All historical empires and war aggressors have used propaganda to claim their looting and police states were necessary and helpful to the 99%. Instead, a sorrowful history tells us they were almost always for the sole benefit of the 1%."
- Albert Bates

Professor Rick Wolff explains why growth has become a focus of our modern political system. He describes how inequality is created by the way our enterprises are organized. Because a significant portion of our lives are at work, how would our society look if democratic businesses became the new normal? What would be the environmental and social implications […]

The Firefly Gathering offers a wide range of classes for adults and children on primitive skills, permaculture, nature connection, and eco-homesteading that are designed to be able to be applied to enhance everyday life. The gathering gathers a bevy of inspiring, amazing people. Besides classes it offers evening entertainment, basic infrastructure, and on-si […]